Thursday, July 09, 2009

Life Links 7/9/09

The Hill shares the Obama administration’s reasoning for not mentioning and responding to the vast majority of comments regarding the NIH’s new human embryonic stem cell funding guidelines.
The NIH witnessed this emotional intensity firsthand. The agency received more than 49,000 comments from the public after issuing a draft of its guidelines in April. About 30,000 of them — many of which were form letters — debated whether the NIH should be funding embryonic stem cell research at all, Kington said.

The NIH disregarded all such comments, labeling them “unresponsive” to the guidelines it released. “We actually did not ask the public whether we should fund research on human embryonic stem cells. We asked the public how we should fund human embryonic stem cell research,” Kington said.


The New York Times has an interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which focuses on women on the courts but also highlights the abortion issue on pages 3 and 4.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.


A woman who received an abortion at the currently shut down Clinica de Mujeres in Las Vegas shared her experience with the local news.
"I had to pay for it first. They didn't give me a receipt. They did an ultrasound which they didn't know how to do," she said. The woman also noted that the equipment appeared dirty.

The health division says Dr. Vickie Mazzorana owns the clinic and is licensed by the medical board. But this patient isn't so sure a female doctor performed her pregnancy termination.

"I was in and out of the procedure and I didn't see the girl doctor in the room. I saw a guy that I hadn't seen at all when I was checking in and he was performing the actual abortion," she said.
Here’s an article which has some background on how the clinic was closed temporarily.


The Kansas City Star has a piece on Randall Terry and his current lack of a following. Terry also seems to have misled the reporter Mary Sanchez into thinking that we was fighting the RICO lawsuit.
But Terry took his hits as well. Years of battling lawsuits, some from abortion providers for disruption of commerce, eventually bankrupted him and he bowed out for years.
Except he didn’t battle the lawsuit.


This is embarrassing. A program in Great Britain which was trying to lower the number of teen pregnancies instead saw program attendees having a much higher rate of pregnancy than their peers.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.

A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People's Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes.

Experts said the scheme failed because it introduced girls 'at risk' of becoming pregnant to promiscuous girls they might not otherwise have met.

Because of peer pressure, the more timid teenagers were more likely to have sex and become pregnant....

The failed YPDP, launched in 2004, was based on a similar scheme in New York claimed to have significantly reduced teenage pregnancies.

However, attempts to replicate the work elsewhere in the U.S. did not lead to a fall in teenage pregnancies, casting doubt on the project as a whole.

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